Emily (Dakota Fanning) is not pleased to see her father's new friend, Elizabeth (Elisabeth Shue). -Contributed photoNEW YORK (AP):
WHAT IS Robert De Niro thinking? The question is being posed not with condescension or derision ... though that's probably how it sounds ... but with curiosity and concern.
When he makes a movie like Hide and Seek ... essentially a B-horror flick with the benefit of a high-quality cast ... is he doing it for a change of pace? He's turned to comedy in recent years from the films (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) that defined his esteemed career early on.
Maybe he felt the need to mix things up again after playing the pent-up gangster shtick of the Analyze This movies and the pent-up retired CIA agent shtick of the Meet the Parents movies.
Certainly the first two-thirds of this generically titled thriller are engrossing enough, chock full of good, old-fashioned scary movie images and ideas.
RAMBLING VICTORIAN HOME
De Niro plays New York City psychologist David Callaway, who takes his daughter, Emily (Dakota Fanning), to a dinky town upstate after the suicide of his wife (Amy Irving). David and Emily move into a rambling Victorian home with creaky doors and hardwood floors, surrounded by dark woods and blanketed in perpetual cloud cover.
Creepy neighbours stop by with homemade preserves or to drop off extra keys in the middle of the night, and the sheriff (Dylan Baker) personally patrols every home but still finds time to write parking tickets.
Hoping to start over, David becomes friendly with cute divorcée Elizabeth (Elisabeth Shue) and hopes that Emily will come out of her frequently stoic state to make new friends, too. What he doesn't realise is that Emily does have a buddy: His name is Charlie.
Charlie is 'fun like mommy'. Charlie does not want daddy to be happy. David assumes this is an imaginary pal, the manifestation of her grief. His protégé, Katherine (Famke Janssen), who's Emily's psychologist back in the city, agrees.
Then the bodies start piling up. Emily, in her small, eerie voice, blames them on Charlie. Eventually she insists that Charlie made her help him. (And her evil drawings and the menacing messages written in crayon in her scrawl sure seem to implicate her.) But Emily is a tiny person ... clearly she couldn't have done all this on her own.
TELEPATHIC ABILITY
She doesn't have the telepathic homicidal ability of Damien the devil child from The Omen, nor does she have the superhuman strength that satanic possession gave Regan in The Exorcist. And the film's abundant red herrings suggest Charlie could be a real dude. Here's where the weakness of Ari Schlossberg's script really comes to a head. Not to give anything away, but De Niro is forced to say and do things that an actor of his stature should not have to say and do.
As an audience member, it's uncomfortably embarrassing to watch. The last third of the movie aims for scary; instead, it's unintentionally funny.
But Fanning, who previously co-starred in I Am Sam and Man on Fire, continues to prove herself as an actress with impressive poise and talent beyond her mere 10 years. Dying her blond hair brown makes her big, blue eyes look even bigger, which adds a layer of spookiness to the film.
Hide and Seek is a movie that presumably she'll want to hide on her filmography as she crafts her own esteemed career.
Hide and Seek, a Twentieth Century Fox release, runs 105 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
